Roots, tubers, and bananas (RTB) are vital food sources for over 3 billion people in Africa, offering high calorie yields per hectare and essential nutrients. More resilient to drought than other crops, RTB are crucial for poverty alleviation.
By Prasanna Boddupalli, Director, CGIAR Global Maize Program, CIMMYT & CGIAR Global Maize Breeding Lead
How can we ensure crop breeding programs best varieties, faster, and more efficiently? CGIAR’s Breeding Resources Initiative (BRI) is working to bring tools, technologies and services to programs in the CGIAR-NARES (national agricultural research and extension systems) networks.
CGIAR has a rich history of crop breeding results, but modern challenges abound. Too many farmers are still using out-of-date varieties. Climate change is risking crop productivity. And populations in Africa and Asia need more nutritious food now.
Both science and agriculture are often male-dominated. But this is starting to change as women take on stronger roles in science and farm management – and organizations commit to real progress.
Modern agricultural practices have enabled food production to meet — and even outpace — demands from growing populations. But the rapid growth in production has often come at the cost of significant land and water degradation, biodiversity losses and increased greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
Source: International Potato Center (CIP)
To many, crop breeding may sound very scientific and technical. But there are key social aspects to it, too. As we mark International Women’s Day, let’s examine the links between gender and the science of breeding.
Handheld device being deployed in the wheat physiology process. Source: Alfredo Sáenz, CIMMYT
A woman cassava farmer in the Northern Region of Ghana. Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)
There is an urgent need for public breeding programs to prioritize and focus their efforts. Excellence in Breeding (EiB) is working with CGIAR partners to identify market segments and align breeding pipelines to them — with the goal of increasing food security and improving livelihoods.
Breeders, economists, gender specialists, and food technologists are gathering together to advance new approaches to breeding crop varieties that people will want.
Approaches that delivered the Green Revolution are now surpassed by more advanced methodologies and technologies. And adoption of these has moved too slowly in public sector breeding. CGIAR Excellence in Breeding (EiB) is tackling this head-on by working across partners to accelerate the modernization of breeding programs.
As breeders develop varieties that meet farmers’ needs, we need to ensure the entire R&D process improves water sustainability. Here are three ways crop breeders can manage water to deliver the best seeds and create the best conditions for long-term crop production.
More impactful crop varieties can be designed using gender-responsive tools and data that reveal the needs of different users in the value chain, including women farmers, consumers and food processors.
If you had to choose one word that symbolizes “women in science,” what would it be? CGIAR Excellence in Breeding asked this question to an array of women working across the crop breeding domain.
By Hugo Campos and Michael Quinn
Originally an EiB Op-Ed published on Farming First.
By Gustavo Teixeira, Theresa Heitman and Adam Hunt
Crop breeding programs are setting an example for how to examine and improve their work – while embedding this process into organizational culture. It's all to better meet the needs of their customers, namely breeders, farmers and donors. Here, experts walk through the process, and examine a CGIAR rice breeding case study from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
How can breeders and other research programs continually improve their processes and products? And how can they ensure they keep a customer focus at the centre of their work?
Plant breeders produce new varieties for their customers: farmers. To predict what kinds of new varieties are likely to offer significant benefits to farmers, breeders may turn to their customers to evaluate which characteristics might make a new variety more acceptable.
A pilot study to validate tools that will help breeders to pay more attention to gender is about to be launched with two breeding programs in Nigeria and Kenya.
As scientists and professionals, our instinct is to calculate and map out the way ahead, but science and technology is only the tip of the iceberg; lasting impact will come by first changing our behaviors, not the other way around.
In March 2019, EiB surveyed its members to identify the models of equipment currently used to digitize breeding operations.
These include package printers, label printers, barcode readers, electronic data collectors and seed counters that can be used to speed up, standardize and introduce efficiency savings into breeding program operations.
The survey results will be used to guide the outreach agenda of EiB module leaders, while the makes and models of equipment preferred by EiB users are available for reference on the EiB Toolbox.
Meat and dairy products are central to the Latin American diet, and livestock is a source of income for over 600 million people living on less than US $1 per day around the world. Historically, a lack of quality forage crops has restricted production and increased the environmental impact of livestock farming, with poor-quality grazing areas being created through deforestation.
In 2019, all CGIAR Centers are focused on taking breeding program impact to the next level.